I have no good idea what these are, other than peppers bred specifically for ornamentation. I also couldn’t tell you if this color works in their favor or not. The bright color of most fruits attracts critters to eat them, but in the case of peppers, the high capsaicin content (the stuff that makes them hot) targets their consumption by birds and not mammals, since birds cannot taste it – this enables peppers to spread faster because, you know, birds flying about and all that. But are birds gastronomically attracted to purple?
We all need a bug
Obviously, we’re getting well away from arthropod season right now, plus I’ve had little opportunity to chase photos anyway, so we’re going to step back to July with this one, the same cooperative dragonfly as seen here. This is a female blue dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis,) posing on a dried rosebud. The ‘blue’ bits would still be out of the frame had this been a male, showing primarily on the long abdomen, but the females don’t display this anyway – I guess calling the species ‘sometimes blue dasher’ just didn’t sound right.
Going slow with dragonflies can often permit nice, close approaches, since they seem more alerted by sudden movement than by proximity. In fact, it’s not hard to get them to perch on your fingertip; just slide your finger very slowly towards them, straight in from the front and slightly beneath, and when right under the chin, push up gently under the head until they have to step onto your finger or fly away – most times they’ll simply take a new perch on your finger, perhaps after tilting their head around rapidly a few times in apparent confusion. Don’t worry about biting – even when they’re so inclined (usually only if they feel threatened,) their mouthparts aren’t strong enough to do anything more than tickle us. It’s good practice for moving slowly, and really impresses the babes (I’m guessing, anyway – I mean, it has to, right?)
Anyway, I just liked the juxtaposition of sharp elements and delicate colors with this one, so it’s been sitting in my blog folder waiting for an opportunity. And here we are…
The cosmic ballet goes on
I had intended to post this earlier, but life got in the way, mostly in the form of an illness that caused me to cancel out on two students this weekend. ‘Tis the season…
Anyway, there is a cool event going on tomorrow (Monday, December 7th) during daylight hours, one that may be worth going out at a specific set of times to try and see. Venus is going to pass behind the crescent moon – or be occulted by the moon, if you want to be accurate/pedantic. No, this does not mean chickens and pentagrams and all that, it just means ‘pass behind;‘ astronomers aren’t that exciting. You might think that this wouldn’t be visible in daylight, or at least not the Venus part, but Venus is often visible during the day in clear skies – you just have to know where to look to see a small bright spot against a reasonably bright sky. And, by all accounts, it will be notably bright. Check out this post on Universe Today for the viewing details.
The image here is courtesy of the program Stellarium, which is handy for things like this – it accurately shows occultations, eclipses, and other such events, though it does not have satellites and comets included. With the program, you can figure out exactly when Venus will disappear behind the moon and later emerge, and what position in the sky they will be – all you need is a reasonably accurate longitude for your locale. If you’re near central Carolina, the time shown here is emergence tomorrow.
By the way, you should be checking out Universe Today on a regular basis anyway – it’s got loads of neat posts.
Part two of this post is just for giggles. I was in need of a small, specific joint for a photo project, but wasn’t willing to pay a lot for it. After much poking around, I found what I needed in this action figure from WalMart: Carlos Perez, AKA “Gills,” from The Corps! Elite. His pose here is slightly indicative of why I chose him, though in truth any one of his fellow Corps!members would have worked – his fingers aren’t articulated or he’d be flashing a gang sign (or perhaps a Girl Scout salute – I’m not up on such things.) This is the last time you’ll see him intact…
Too cool, part 29: Flatulent Enceladus
The very fact that there is liquid underneath that ice, so far from the sun, is what makes Enceladus one of our solar system’s most interesting bodies, and a target for future missions. The transport, binding, and catalyzing of elements into molecules takes place readily in liquid water, and is considered the prime factor in the development of life; things gotta mix. Liquid water not only needs a certain temperature, but a certain pressure, otherwise water exists either as ice or vapor. When we look at exoplanets around other stars, we’re looking for planets of a certain size and a certain distance from the star, to not only maintain the necessary temperature, but also to attract an atmosphere dense enough to keep water in place for billions of years. Mars was a little too small, and lost most of what water it had because the atmosphere got too thin to keep the moisture and it, literally, wafted off into space. Comets have ice that sublimates directly into vapor because there’s no atmosphere to speak of.
Enceladus, however, is different. We have to extrapolate everything about it from distant observations, but what we have now indicates that both radioactive decay in the core and the strong tidal influences of Saturn and other nearby moons keeps the rocky core hot – hot enough to maintain liquid water underneath a shielding layer of ice, melted from within rather than from the distant sun. What this means is that this moon of Saturn might be a self-contained ecosystem, capable of developing and supporting life completely underneath its thick ice mantle. It’s a long shot, of course, but a handful of both Saturn’s and Jupiter’s moons with similar conditions are the best chances we have of seeing extraterrestrial life.
Not that it would be easy. The frozen crust of Enceladus is estimated to be about 30-40 kilometers thick, or 19-25 miles. Unless we devised some method of negotiating down through one of the cracks that allow the geysers seen in the photo, we’d have to have a probe that could melt its way down through all that, which is a serious amount of energy. It would also have to avoid any contamination of the ocean beneath, and leave some kind of antenna or transmitter on the surface since no signal would be able to be sent from the probe beneath that much ice. The entire prospect is a massive physics exercise.
And just as a bit of trivia, Enceladus is only 500 km across, in comparison to our own moon’s diameter of 3,500 km, and thus possesses a commensurately lower gravity. Most of the water vapor escaping out through those cracks doesn’t remain near the moon’s surface, but instead forms Saturn’s E-ring – wispy, near-invisible, and stretching out many times the diameter of the rings we can see from Earth.
This highlights some of the accomplishments of the Cassini probe. None of this information has been provided by direct contact, and even visually, there’s only so much that can be determined from looking at the surface. Since its arrival in orbit around Saturn in 2004, the probe has been vastly expanding our knowledge of the ringed planet and its abundant collection of satellites. The composition of Enceladus, among many other aspects of the probe’s mission, has been interpolated from gravitational measurements and observations of orbital eccentricities; the floating ice crust, for instance, appears to be moving too much to be anchored to any solid surface beneath. Check out NASA’s pages on the Cassini mission for more info, including this one of Enceladus images, and Wikipedia’s page on Enceladus is remarkably detailed.
And another bit of trivia, because I’m a photographer. The image above is at or near full resolution (depending on your monitor settings) – if you want a closer or more detailed look at the geysers, too bad. The optical camera on Cassini is a mere one megapixel, which seems ridiculous to us now, but the probe was launched in 1997, and designed long before that; the digital options for consumers at that time weren’t significantly better, and certainly not affordable. If you’re curious, see this page for more details on how imagery in space probes is handled.
There are some more observations about related topics to come, but this is all I have time for right now. Check back shortly.
November’s abstract (a day late)
Dammit, I meant to post this yesterday, and forgot all about it. I’m disappointing my legions of readers…
While I’ve had it in the back of my mind to maintain this new ‘tradition’ of posting an abstract at month’s end, it hasn’t worked out for every month. But I knew this one was in the running the moment I saw how it had turned out. With most subjects, I already know how the image is going to look because every aspect is predictable; I know how the depth-of-field is going to render, and what the contrast will become and all that. And with some, I never know until I see the final image, like in this case. The gently undulating water reflecting the sunlight would be frozen at the moment the shutter tripped, producing a specific set of sparkles, while the bright light coming in would cause an exposure entirely different from what I was seeing in the viewfinder. I shot several frames, and picked this one for the layout of the starbursts. Those starbursts, however, were largely known, or at least the effect was, since it’s produced by using a small aperture. Two of them falling onto the leaf as they did was serendipity.
Meanwhile, a follow-up to last week’s Monday color, because. An overnight frost finally convinced the cherry tomato plant to give it up and discard its fruit onto the porch below.
Monday color 43
Today’s Monday color is another from this session back in August; some days I get one or two solid ‘keepers,’ some days I get dozens. On rare occasions I’m pleased with nothing and throw out almost everything I shoot. On those days, I pretend I was busy doing something else…
BIAB: Colin Hay fourfer
Yes, we’re digging back into the deposits of ancient music again, because it’s a blog (see title.) The choice this time around is Colin Hay, formerly the lead singer and guitarist of the Australian group Men At Work, then going solo in the late 80s, then headlining the Colin Hay Band (curious coincidence, that) in the early 90s before going solo again. He’s still producing albums and is currently touring, but right now we’re going to look back at the older stuff.
Pretty much everyone knows “Overkill,” from Men At Work’s second album Cargo, released in 1983 and in my opinion the most compelling track from two very strong albums; the other, their first, was Business As Usual from 1981. Far too many people nowadays know the song from the TV show Scrubs, which is fine, but it probably means they’re ignoring the superb collection of other tracks from both albums. If you haven’t heard it in a while, or haven’t bothered to listen to it closely, it’s worth another shot. In particular, pay attention to how everything has its place, none of the instruments crashing into white noise or feedback, instead providing a very pleasant and subtle blend that was typical of music from the 80s. There’s a background ‘breeze’ that comes and goes, at times clearly vocals but at others (such as during the instrumental bridge) the tones are indistinct and may or may not still be vocal samples. Regardless, it manifests a pleasant and slightly ethereal choir underneath the more obvious instruments. Special credit goes to those responsible for the mix, which brings in gentle surges of the keyboards or bass just to counterpoint the lyrics.
Overkill – Men At Work
I always interpreted the song as being about the cold war, which was seeing a resurgence in the eighties before it finally collapsed in the early nineties, but according to Hay, the meaning is more generic, the anxiety of sudden success and the changes it brings.
“It’s a Mistake” runs a close second behind this one, even more recognizable and featuring an arguably better vocal performance from Hay (listen for the subtle tremolos that come in, most often at the ends of bars.) The guitar work is unsurpassable as well, but the song lacks the mellow vibe of “Overkill,” so I’m sticking to my guns for this personal preference.
Some of the bandmembers split after Cargo, leaving three to produce Two Hearts before Men At Work dissolved for good. A few years later in 1987, Colin Hay released the solo album Looking For Jack, with the assistance of a laundry list of studio musicians. Though there are a few exceptions among the tracks, the album showed a distinctive progression from the pop sound of Men At Work to a softer rock feel, as well as betraying Hay’s interests in world travel. The cover art makes it clear that the ‘Jack’ that is sought is Nicholson, though why this should be is unclear, and not corrected terribly well by the lyrics of the title track. Nonetheless, it is a pleasant little song, with a piano and guitar playing a duet as the main instruments in a sprightly composition:
Looking For Jack – Colin Hay
In 1990, Hay teamed with three new musicians to form the Colin Hay Band, and released Wayfaring Sons, featuring musical styles that, I feel, were the strongest throughout his long career. With this album comes the first indications of the acoustic influence that would later dominate Hay’s work and define his later albums, yet at this point it was only one aspect of a widely varied instrument lineup. The album itself has more of a ‘soundtrack’ vibe to me, milder and able to work strongly as background music, which is not to minimize the performances at all – it’s just a different feel. There’s more use of studio vocalists for backing, and a generally breezier tone.
Among the majority of very strong tracks comes the playfully naughty “Dream On (In The Night)” – hardly risqué by any standards today, but seeming slightly out of line with the mellow musical style and thus highlighted by that. We’re not talking “sex” here, but “foolin’ around,” and the difference is evident enough when you listen to it. But also pay attention to the bass wandering around in the background and offering mildly sardonic commentary.
Dream On (In The Night) – Colin Hay
Other great works from the album are the title track “Wayfaring Sons,” “Not So Lonely,” and the pleasant prerequiem “Ya (Rest In Peace),” but virtually all of the album is solid – the only one I’m likely to skip the MP3 player over is “Help Me,” but that’s due to its sharper tones that don’t blend as well with the rest of the lineup. If you liked the track I’ve included, definitely check out the rest of the album.
From that point on, Hay stayed almost strictly acoustic, and most of his songs display only his own instrumental work mixed with one another. For his 2003 album Man @ Work, several of the old classics had been re-recorded as acoustic versions. I have to admit I’m not a big fan of acoustic guitar, at least not as the primary or sole instrument – it receives far more attention than is warranted, especially with the ‘American’ style that is seen so often (as opposed to, say, flamenco-style, which is entirely different and far more dynamic.) The Girlfriend and I had the opportunity to see Hay in concert locally, in 2009 I believe, at a small venue that made the most of acoustic music – there were perhaps 200 people in attendance. Knowing that the audience was probably more familiar with the older stuff than the newer, Hay’s set featured only the most popular of his later work and a good mix of the earlier stuff, often showcasing a clever little digital addition to his acoustic guitar that could simultaneously play a pre-recorded loop from the same guitar, so he was in fact doing a duet with himself, live. With the small stage, Hay was able to relate a lot of anecdotes from his years in the various bands and touring with others, including playing with Ringo Starr and a somewhat surreal story about lamingtons. It was Men At Work that brought vegemite to the consciousness of the greater world, to almost no one’s delight, but lamingtons sound a lot more palatable.
Anyway, in comparison, we return to the first song featured, this time acoustically – you can decide for yourself which one works better.
Overkill (acoustic) – Colin Hay
I can say, however, that the effect is entirely different with everyone in a small auditorium singing along – unbeatable, actually. Maybe we can talk him into releasing that version.
Thursday color
Just a few pics without a lot of explanation, because they don’t need it. Two are fairly recent, and one has actually been seen before, dating from May.
Two weeks back, I was at the nearby pond watching what the sunset colors were doing when the Canada geese (Branta canadensis) departed, though a handful of them circled the pond at low level, honking loudly – I can only surmise they were trying to convince the others to follow. This is one of those slightly tricky situations, because one can track the geese as they circle, but framing them against an interesting portion of sky takes a little bit of timing and foresight – it’s easy to realize afterward that it would have looked better if they had been captured there instead of here, but by then it’s too late. This is where being able to shoot with both eyes open can help, because you can ‘scout’ the background they are about to cross with the other eye before they reach it and plan accordingly. You can also hear the honking that signifies their impending takeoff and realize that they’re likely to appear or cross there, and be ready. This includes thinking if a horizontal or vertical composition will work better, and whether you can pull off a shutter speed that’s fast enough. It’s not hard, it just requires being on your toes. The hint of trees included at the bottom of the frame here ‘grounds’ the geese near the horizon instead of simply being someplace overhead, as they would appear without it.
Naturally, in honor of the day I have to include this pic from earlier in the year, during a trip to NJ. This turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) really was wild, even though it was one of many accustomed to a semi-domestic situation, wandering through yards in a Jersey housing development. Art Carlson was actually somewhat correct: wild turkeys can fly, just not the over-fattened domestic ones raised for food.
And another, taken minutes apart from the geese shot, because. I’ll leave this here for a second and let you soak it in, before I start talking about it.
Now, did you notice that vertical band of clouds to the right? It’s actually a contrail, one of the things that makes sunrise and sunset pics in this area such a pain in the ass – they’ll appear in the same conditions as the clouds that make for interesting skies, but of course clouds don’t make these narrow long lines across the sky. To me, it adds the wrong kind of element to the scene, but in this case it was broad enough and subtle enough that I don’t think it actually registers – correct me if I’m wrong. I did another composition where I aligned the edge of the contrail with the bigger branch right alongside the leaves, making it even subtler, but then the change in position meant the leaves were crossed by other branches instead of being framed in space as seen here, and I didn’t like it as much. Decisions, decisions…
Play MST3K for me. And you. Everyone.
Let me paint a little picture for you. It’s an ancient time. “Blu Ray” was what people thought Gainsborough’s model was named. “YouTube” was a surfing slang term (as was every set of words put together nonsensically) and surfing was only done in the ocean, because webpages were few and all of them sucked – Geocities was in the future and would, ever so briefly, be considered an improvement. And there was this little underground movement, the surreptitious shuffling of bulky packages (leave it alone) that took place in locker rooms (sheesh) chess club meeting rooms and the parking lot after work, the exchanges of ominous black boxes called, “VHS,” the currency of the MST3K fanatics.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 was one of the most creative shows ever to grace several different networks, with a simple yet compelling format: play absolutely shitty movies and tear the hell out of them – kind of like the annoying jerks in the theater, but targeted towards films that are only improved by the commentary. There was an explanation, of sorts, for this activity, which took place on the milkbonesque Satellite of Love, where a human captive and the two robots he’d built/inherited were forced to watch these terrible movies as some sort of experiment perpetrated by mad (or perhaps slightly irritable) scientists. The sets were obviously homemade and only slightly cheaper than those on the original Star Trek, and that was part of the charm. What we all watched for, though, was the biting commentary on cinematic schlock that had been mercifully ignored for ages.
All of that, naturally, was to introduce you to the concept if you haven’t already been exposed to it, and to hopefully spark some interest. Because if you have been exposed to it, especially if you’ve lamented its cancellation, I am here to help spread the word that it’s coming back – this time through crowd-funding, because fuck network decision-makers and the crayons they keep eating. While the campaign has already reached its initial goal as I write this, there’s an upper goal too, which would permit a full dozen new episodes to be created. Click here for the details. And as it always goes for Kickstarter backers, the more you contribute, the better it gets, as you become eligible for bonus materials in recognition of your generosity and discerning taste.
But there’s another reason that I’m posting: we are also seeing the return of Turkey Day, which is not just an unoriginal slang term for Thanksgiving, but an appropriate term for an MST3K marathon taking place at that same link Thursday, November 26th, starting at noon Eastern, 9 AM Pacific, or to get everyone on the same damn system, 5 PM UTC “Zulu.” These will be classic episodes, yet to be announced, but almost certainly a few gems in there.
I’ll be the first to admit, MST3K could be hit or miss, and everyone has their favorite hosts and/or seasons. Plus, it doesn’t strike everyone the same way. Some of the jokes were weak; some were remarkably sophisticated. And sometimes, it was nothing but merciless:
After the show was cancelled, many of the cast and crew split off to do much the same thing with virtually no budget, creating RiffTrax and Cinematic Titanic, as well as appearing at live shows. The fan base has been vast, and yet will hopefully get a bit vaster.
I can’t leave it at that. No doubt everyone has memories of those aged education films that we all had to watch in schools, and quite often, when the feature movie wasn’t going to prove long enough for the format, there was also a ‘short’ tacked on at the beginning, like so:
So, tune in (or, whatever) Thursday, pledge some support, and have fun!
Monday color 42
Taken just a few days back, this is another current one for Monday color. Despite having a couple of overnight frosts, and the bare fact that the tomato plants never did well this year because of the sporadic sunlight in the back yard, one of the cherry tomato plants is still valiantly, defiantly producing fruit (and yes, tomatoes are a fruit.)
This, by the way, is another example of the lighting produced by the new flash reflector – a little directional, but not too harsh. Notice the lack of sharp shadows anywhere, including by foreground stems onto background tomatoes. In fact, the light seems softer than the earlier shots of the same tomato plant with the former rig that I liked, though those were shot at night while this one was during the day, and so ambient light might have played a small part. I’m still experimenting…